Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL): According to CIBC iPhone has seen a significant decline

- CIBC's Ittai Kidron is out with monster call on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) saying based on their store checks, they believe that demand for the iPhone has seen a significant decline in the past 10 days. CIBC has noticed decent inventories at stores, and thin demand at best. In fact, most Apple store visitors were not looking at the device and only a very small subset bought it.

With the weakness, they wouldn't be surprised to see AT&T and Apple step up their marketing efforts. Firm's channel checks suggest Apple is actually looking to introduce a 3G version of the iPhone for the U.S. market in November, ahead of the holiday season and earlier than currently expected.

Recent survey of iPhone buyers suggested that the key shortcoming of the current device is its poor data connectivity (EDGE). This isn't a surprise and Apple's CEO Steve Jobs admitted the iPhone's cellular connectivity can use an improvement. CIBC now believes the "improvement" could come soon.

Notablecalls: AAPL stock is going to get hit today. Big time! Positive iPhone flow has driven AAPL up 50 bucks over the past months. CIBC's call will erase some of this. I expect to see 5 bucks of downside today! Actionable call! Short at will!

PS: Note that ThinkEquity upped their tgt on Synchronoss (NASDAQ:SNCR) yesterday to $44 from $36 based on increased expectations for the iPhone. The stock was also added to Think's Top Picks list. SCNR has enjoyed a nice run, fueled by iPhone flow. I would not be surprised to see weakness in SCNR following CIBC's call.

18 comments:

Of course demand has dropped from the launch.. do they really think Apple are going to carry on selling 250k/day? Now that all Apple Stores and AT&T Stores are fully stocked, there won't be queues around the block any more. If there wasn't a "significant drop" from the launch then Apple would be selling 7M iPhones/month Christ, what a stupid, dumb, pointless and meaningless call.

I agree with CIBC.. there has likely been an 80%+ drop in iPhone demand since the launch weekend. Apple are probably selling 500k-750k/month now.

And that's meant to get me worried???? For god's sake CIBC, do some f-ing maths. And as for noteablecalls advice to "short at will,".. I recall them saying that when Apple was at $78.

You may get a short term pullback as a result of this shoddy piece of work but I think you will be proved horribly wrong on this one. Agree with the comments above that sustaining a million phone sales every two days was impossible and hardly a surprise to anyone - except you apparently.

We believe Apple's fundamentals remain strong on market-share gains in desktops and laptops, success with digital-media players and software, and notable inroads in the smartphone category. Based largely on these successes, we believe Apple should trade at a greater premium to the p-e-to-growth rate of the S&P 500 Technology Sector, and we are raising our 12-month target price to $155 from $135. However, we think our downgrade is warranted by risk-reward considerations, especially with expectations high and Apple scheduled to report June-quarter results on Wednesday.

Guys take it easy, Notable Calls is just posting what's out there, don't shoot the messenger!

I agree with Notable Calls. This market is very over bought. We are SOO overdue for a correction and AAPL has run up on the iPhone launch news for too long. If I owned AAPL I would be looking to take some profits here.

The AAPL "day before earnings FUDs" is a known phenomenon... everyone is free to take advantage of this :D

I also want to add that no matter how positive, even on a blow-out earnings report, AAPL always seems to disappoint partly due to some so-called "whisper" number that always seems to be 10X higher than what's reported.